COMMENTS
203
Americans. Already, "foreigners" over here are picked by CEOs to assist
them with overseas affairs, and much else. Thus we had better get on the
ball rather than be caught by surprise when the "vitriol" Fishman refers to
catches up.
In
other words, instead of addressing language teaching in terms
of costs, or of one psychological nostrum or another, it behooves us to
teach foreign languages if we want to retain our edge in the global econ–
omy, and to create and hold on to production and jobs. Even the
speculation about the ultimate relation between the euro and the dollar,
and all that this entails, will depend on it.
Two Holocaust Films
The LAst Days
and
Life
is
Beautiful
are the current
Holocaust films, the former an impressive Spielberg documentary, the lat–
ter a beautiful tearjerker. During the same week, the audience at the
former, for the most part, consisted of persons born in Europe and their
middle-aged children, whereas the latter drew a larger, more diverse and
somewhat younger group.
It
has been assumed that poetry after the
Holocaust is impossible, at least for anyone who barely escaped a death
camp. But this does not seem to hold for films: the less they adhere to the
brutal reality, the better they are attended, and the greater the distortions,
the more they whip up the imagination-of filmmakers as well as viewers.
Life
is
Beautiful,
which shows a father's alleged self-sacrifice for his beauti–
ful little boy, is heartwrenching, but is a total invention.
The Last Days,
which intersperses the stories of five survivors with visual accounts record–
ed at the end of World War II is evocative, hard to take, and yet must be
multiplied by the fate of the six million people who no longer can docu–
ment anything, and by their relatives who still keep wondering just when,
where, and how their dead ended up.
On the one hand, to try preventing future atrocities we must nip the
prejudices of anti-Semitism and racism in the bud, and can do so only by
exposing as many people as possible to its extreme, inhuman consequences.
On the other hand, it is difficult to entice individuals to spend an evening
watching an unrelenting story of organized murder, emaciated corpses and
merciless brutality. That is the dilemma. To teach the Holocaust as fact
reaches few people, particularly among the unaffected. To make it more
palatabl e, however minimally, not only trivializes it but renders it toothless.
Some of the remaining survivors of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Maidanek,
and other such camps, after a life of silence now spend their days lecturing
about it to school children. But whatever we do, the question of whether
or not we will be able to eradicate racism and anti-Semitism remains an
open one-especially while both the radical left and the radical right claim
the high ground for their political ends.
EK
